It's New Game Friday! David Wiley (Cardboard Clash) is here to tell us about the new games.
Here’s what is new this week:
- AracKhan Wars
- Personal Space: The Commerce Moon
- Roll Crawl
- SpaceShipped: Out of Route
This week's new games are all available at https://www.pnparcade.com/collections/new-games
Roll Crawl
The land is in peril! Two brave adventurers, alongside their loyal companion, set out to defeat the evil enemy boss and its sinister allies.
If you like slaughtering enemies and rolling dice, this game is sure to hit that sweet spot. Using the familiar Yahtzee mechanic of rolling dice up to three times, you are trying to trigger abilities to deal damage to your current enemy. When it gets to act, it will roll a dice per every point of health remaining, which means you could take a ton of damage if you fail to hurt it. But when you think about it, this concept of the enemy growing weaker makes sense. Tackle the game alone or work together with a friend to make your way to the boss and defeat it in order to win. Die and, well, maybe someone will find your corpse when they slaughter their way through the enemies some other time...
AracKhan Wars
Take control of your favorite Province and choose wisely the 23 cards that will constitute your deck with a total of 125 points maximum. Skillfully place your creatures and cast powerful spells to defeat your adversary. One goal: to have the most added card values on the battlefield at the end of the 9th and final round.
A unique take on the familiar genre of games like Magic: The Gathering. Rather than casting out creatures and spells based on an income generating system, you’re able to play cards out and they go onto a grid adjacent to existing cards. Want to attack a card? Only an adjacent card can attack another one. Rather than trying to deplete the opponent’s life force, you are trying to protect your assets enough to score them at the end of the game. This looks awesome and sounds like an interesting approach to this sort of game.
Spaceshipped: Out of Route
Political disturbances have driven you to new regions of space, and here, the markets aren’t as predictable as in your home sector. Your reputation reached here before you did, however, and gained you some new friends, new opportunities and a new ruthless enemy.
This expansion to an excellent little solo game does exactly what you’d want in a solo game: add new cards without changing the core ruleset. Setup remains the same, and the cards get mixed into the appropriate types and drawn out at random. What it does add is a small little Market Flux feature, which adjusts which card you look at for pricing in the market for the turn. Let’s just say that helps take some of the foresight and planning and tosses them out the window when that happens, spicing up the risk/reward periodically. Don’t like that mechanic? Well, you can easily leave those cards out I guess. Or you can take some risks and press your luck a little, getting the spike of adrenaline when it actually pays off.
Personal Space: The Commerce Moon
Welcome to your Personal Space. A continuous game of living your best life.
In Personal Space, you’ll play once a day (if you would like to) and experience a little bit of the daily life on your planet. You can go to your job, collect resources, explore side moons, interact with your neighbors, interact with other players, and much more.
There are real life elements to the game (your real life weather and time of day will matter), and there is some real life communication involved as well (you can interact and trade with other players - and the game - online - for example, do you want a better job in game? You can apply online for it.).
There are also continuous or legacy elements where you place stickers onto cards, customizing your experience and making your game unlike any other.
Ah yes, Personal Space. The game you can play daily for a new experience every day, one of the most ambitious (and impressive) games created so far. I’ve enjoyed my time with Personal Space, although the pressure of playing daily wasn’t quite my cup of tea (even knowing it was self-imposed pressure, as you don’t have to play every day!). There’s even a Discord channel just for the players of this game, where you can find activities, shops, and folks from your same home planet to discuss the game with. If you want an immensely replayable game with a core community and social aspects, this is definitely one to check out. And even if you aren’t certain it is right for you, this game is so unique it is worth at least trying out to see what is possible in the game design space.
Note: The Commerce Moon adds a new place to visit, with a new neighbor, a featured location that lets you trade resources for money, and a place to buy coffee!
Check out all of the new games here: https://www.pnparcade.com/collections/new-games
Game of the Week: Fire in the Library
Despite the best efforts of you and your fellow Librarians. A fire threatens the sum of all human knowledge. You must save as many precious tomes from the flames as you can before the consuming inferno collapses the Library forever.
Fire in the Library is a press-your-luck game about saving books from being burned. Push the odds and channel your courage, earning Knowledge Points and Bravery Points, which are needed to win the game. The player with the highest combined point total when the game ends is the winner.
Let’s be honest, I’m the sort of person that would run into a burning house to save something silly like a book (or board game). So when I play Fire in the Library, I can imagine I am actually doing the selfless deed of saving important works of writing...but I am horrible with knowing when to push my luck and when to stop. Which is probably why I am bad at this game, yet I absolutely enjoy this game. If you haven’t tried it before, this one is sure to delight you, and it even has a pretty good solo mode in there. This scales up to 6 players, and is great for family, friends, spouses, and even children to enjoy together for a bit of fun pressing your luck trying to save some books. Plus, that art from Beth Sobel is absolutely stunning.
Check out Game of the Week here: https://www.pnparcade.com/collections/game-of-the-week
See you next week with more information on our newest print and play games!